Whole Foods for Your Whole Kitchen

The grand re-opening of the ginormous Whole Foods on Pearl Street in Boulder starts today, and culminates Sunday with a concert by Big Head Todd and The Monsters.

You may think you’ve seen the “new” store if you’ve been in and perused their incredible prepared foods section, but what you probably haven’t seen—because it was just completed in the last few days—is their new bulk foods section, renamed the cooking department.  This new initiative from Whole Foods includes Beth Pilar, the store’s new cooking coach.  That’s right: the next time you find a product in the store that you’d love to try, but don’t have the first clue how to cook (don’t lie—it’s happened to all of us), Beth can help you out with simple cooking instructions or recipe suggestions from the store’s media collection, all right there at her little kiosk in the cooking department.

But what happens if you get there at an off time, when Beth isn’t around?  Well, there’s an app for that.

Whole Foods has teamed up with the website Food52 to create their own web community, http://boulder.wholefoodsmarketcooking.com/ and the cooking department is outfitted with iPads that can reach the site any time, offering recipes shoppers can easily email to themselves, as well as the Food Pickler section, in which users can ask one another for advice, such as “What is the benefit or purpose of using unfiltered olive oil?” or How long do pinto beans need to soak?

And, per those two questions above, the bulk section also offers a few new goodies including heirloom dry beans, bulk olive oil and vinegar, and a superfoods station.

If you’re super quick, there’s still time to sign up for a VIP tour of the store. DO IT NOW!